Blurring the Boundary between History and Fictionin Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
Date
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Department of English
Abstract
The Satanic Verses is a post modern fiction about the condition of migrant people,
struggling to protect their existence in foreign-land because the history and religious
rigidity does not allow them to cope on the situation and turn it in to religion burden.By
fictionalizing the history of Islamic world through the dream vision of protagonist and of
fallible narrator, novel deliberately decontextualizes the origin of religious discourse.By
inserting the imagination to the historical records, Rushdie fictionalized single holy
treatise into plural versions.
Salman Rushdie uses historiographic meta fiction as a narrative tool to focuses on
fictional formation of historical records so that the politics behind every human artifact
could appear. By exposing how history hides its fiction and highlights its fact to meet
their subjective goal, this research study comes to the conclusion that so-called
transcendental holy writ is only mere construction of human imagination. The novel
explores the human divided self in multicultural milieu that does not rely on their own
cultural root. Therefore, historical episode is suspected and triggered the human
imagination in place of religious submission. The novel mixes fiction and history so that
it fits to the present post modernist context.